command-line on S Anand

Command line alarm

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:37:24 +0000

When I’m in front of my laptop, I usually forget the world around. Sadly, the world around has important things that need to get done on time. Like eating medicines, turning off the washing machine or the hob, etc.

The one thing I’ve been lacking on my machine was a simple alarm system. I’d like to set an alarm to remind me to do something in 5 minutes, for example. And it should be dead simple to set up.

After hunting around a fair for freeware to do this, I’ve finally settled on writing this tiny piece of Visual Basic code.

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
If WScript.Arguments.length < 2 Then
  WScript.Echo "Usage: alarm <time-in-minutes> <message>"
Else
  WScript.Sleep WScript.Arguments.Item(0) * 60 * 1000
  msg = ""
  For i = 1 to WScript.Arguments.Count - 1
      msg = msg + WScript.Arguments.Item(i) + " "
  Next
  WshShell.Popup msg, -1, "Alarm", 64
End If

I’ve saved this as “alarm.vbs” somewhere in my path. When I need to set an alarm, I just type

alarm 5 Turn off the hob

This pops up a window in 5 minutes with the alarm:

This turned out to be a life-saver yesterday. I had to catch a flight at the Bangalore airport, and traffic is notoriously bad. To be on the safe side, I set up the following:

alarm 25 Catch the flight
alarm 30 You really need to go now
alarm 35 You've missed the flight

Turned out to be a wise thing. I ignored the first alarm. On the second, I said “OK, OK, just 1 minute…” and it really took the third alarm to get me going. Just barely made it to the flight.

Comments

Abhijit Sen 10 Feb 2010 12:07 am: Anand. is it required to have a VB client to run this VB script?
408wij 26 Jan 2010 10:28 pm: For us uninformed Americans, hob=stove, right?
Sumit Dhar 25 Jan 2010 1:14 am: Hey Anand, Was it a flight for UK? If you are gonna be back in Bangalore, let us meet up sometime. Cheers, Sumit
Abhijit Sen 12 Feb 2010 1:45 am: Hey Anand. I opened a notepad, copy pasted the above code with the specific number of minutes and message, saved the notepad as Alarm.vbs on my desktop. Nothing happened after the given number of minutes. What am I missing?
S Anand 29 Jan 2010 8:37 am: But isn’t an annoyance the whole point of an alarm?
Anup 28 Jan 2010 12:35 pm: Nice and useful lines. Any clue for sending the annoying window to background…
S Anand 10 Feb 2010 4:49 pm: No, not at all. This comes built in with Windows. Absolutely nothing else required.
Ravi 28 Feb 2010 6:26 pm: You can use gadgets in Vista for. I searched and found one, free.
Ravi 28 Feb 2010 6:30 pm: http://www.puttee.de/ I tried this Anand, works like a charm..
Ravi 14 Feb 2010 7:11 am: @Abhijit - You dont have to specify the minutes and message in the .vbs file. Just save it as it is in a folder. You will have to write the command from the same directory on the DOS Prompt. The command “Alarm x message” takes the minutes and the message as the input and displays them when it runs Alarm.vbs I made this change to the script since I got error in executing the original one. CHANGED “If WScript.Arguments.length < 2 Then” TO “If WScript.Arguments.length < 2 Then” (Message can only be without spaces with this change)
Ramki 19 Jun 2010 5:01 am: I am using WinXP and could not get the script to work with the following line and had to change it as shown below after getting clue from Ravi’s comment: CHANGED “If WScript.Arguments.length < 2 Then” TO “If WScript.Arguments.length < 2 Then”

Launching applications

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Opening programs from the Start - All Programs menu is painful. For many years, I relied on the quick launch bar.

But it’s space constrained. There are only so many applications you can place there. I want space enough for frequently used documents as well. Recently, I decided that I need all the space on the screen. So my task bar is on auto hide, and that makes the quick launch bar a little tougher to use as well. And finally, I can’t use the quick launch bar with the keyboard. That’s important.

So I switched to the pinned menus on the Start Menu.

This works better with the keyboard. I access Word, I just type the Ctrl-Esc, W. Excel: Ctrl-Esc, E. But I run short of letters soon. I have trouble between Powerpoint and processing, for instance. And I can’t store documents.

I tried Enso Launcher and Launchy, both of which are great products, but I just can’t stand the thought of them hogging up all the memory that they do. Launchy in particular.

Given that I almost always have one or two command prompts open, I write my own little tool to do the job now. It’s a command line launcher I’ve written in Perl. I call it “o”. At the first run, it indexes my hard disk. (Well, not all of it. I’ve picked what I need.) Now, if I want to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I just type:

> o harry potter hallows

If I wanted to pick a Harry Potter book, I could:

> o harry potter
    0: D:/Entertainment/Books/Hugo Awards/2001 - J K Rowling - Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire.rar
    1: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.1.Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone.pdf
    2: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.2.Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.pdf
    3: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.3.Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.pdf
    4: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.4.Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.doc
    5: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.5.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.pdf
    6: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf
    7: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.7.Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.pdf
    8: D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.The Harry Potter Encyclopedia.doc
    9: D:/My Pictures/2005-06 London/2005-07-16 06 Waterstones Oxford Street Harry Potter release.JPG
    ... more
> (0-9, q, any word): prince
D:/Entertainment/Books/J K Rowling.6.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.pdf

The program lists the files matching the words I typed, and lets me filter within that.

I just wrote this yesterday, and already, I’ve used it dozens of times. Here’s the source.

PS: While I was at it, I downloaded a Flickr uploader for Perl. So I can now upload images with the command line. This easily saves me at least 5 minutes per article.

Comments

Karthik A 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Oc here
I got equally bugged long back and wrote a python program called fo (folder opener ;-)

Here it is - crude but worked pretty well \
@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \
import os
import ConfigParser
import sys

CONFIGFILENAME = “config.ini”
CONFIGFILENAME1 = “config1.ini”
cleanInp = ‘’
scuth = {}
\
Load all the config file details in a hash \
cfgFile = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
cfgFile.read(CONFIGFILENAME)
cfgFileFP = open(CONFIGFILENAME,‘r+’)

scuts = cfgFile.items(“shortcuts”)

\
load into a dictionary \
for (x,y) in scuts:
scuth[x]=y

print “““Folder and file rapid opener (FO)
————————————
Ctrl-Alt-C - to start
@shortcut,path - to add a shortcut
x - exit
————————————”””

while cleanInp != ‘x’:
inp = raw_input(“Your wish Master!:”)
cleanInp = inp.strip()
if cleanInp.find(’@’) == -1:
try:
os.startfile(scuth[cleanInp])
except:
pass
else:
tmp = cleanInp.split("@")[1]
tmp1 = tmp.split(",")
cfgFile.set(“shortcuts”,tmp1[0], tmp1[1])
cfgFile.write(cfgFileFP)
q
Sathish 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: Anand,

Did you try slickrun.. It is extremely slick..
S Anand 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: @OC: Hey, didn’t realise you were into python. Neat!

@Sathish: How much memory does Slickrun use up? Given some of the apps I’m running on my 1GB laptop, I’m having to count each byte!
oracle 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: The method I use:

enable google desktop by ctrl-ctrl

in the search bar first few alphabets of the app..invariably it shows me the app i need.
Saurabh 2 Aug 2008 12:00 pm: I used to use Launchy before switching to Mac an year book and have been using QuickSilver since then. Dont use the Apple Spotlight, neither the Google Desktop thing..QS does all the work - launching apps, searching for files and quickly accessing them, a nice article abt a great QS trick (for Mac users) here : http://www.43folders.com/2005/06/13/quicksilver-the-comma-trick

BTW Processing.org seems to be interesting, plan to check it out soon!

Cheers!
S Anand 11 Aug 2008 5:35 am: @Sathish: 7MB is not too bad. Launchy was taking up over 25MB in my case.

Chatting with your computer

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Chatting with your computer – the new way of interacting with your DOS prompt.

Star Wars

Sat, 02 Mar 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Star Wars on Telnet. In text. Still worth a look.

command-line on S Anand

Command line alarm

Comments

Launching applications

Comments

@setlocal enableextensions & python -x %~f0 %* & goto :EOF \

Load all the config file details in a hash \

load into a dictionary \

Chatting with your computer

Star Wars